Jan. 25, 2014

Ben Brust #1 of the Wisconsin Badgers dribbles the ball along the baseline as Terone Johnson #0 of the Purdue Boilermakers defends at Mackey Arena on January 25, 2014 in West Lafayette, Indiana. Wisconsin defeated Purdue 72-58. / Getty Images

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WEST LAFAYETTE — Four days after the shooting that rocked the Purdue campus, life felt close to back to normal Saturday. Students roamed the streets, bundled against the winter chill. Inside Mackey Arena, the students had the place rocking as always, reminding the world, as usual, that “IU sucks,” while trying to inspire their over-matched Boilermakers against ninth-ranked Wisconsin.

This was an important game for Purdue, and a painful setback, a 72-58 loss, but the game felt like something of an afterthought after a week that saw terror visited upon a classroom in the Electrical Engineering Building. After a week of vigils and grief counseling, this was the first chance for the whole campus to come together, to scream their lungs out together, to heal together.

Then more bad news came down Friday night, news that had basketball coach Matt Painter fighting back tears in his postgame press conference. Associate athletic director and former Gene Keady assistant Tom Reiter, the man who gave Painter his start in college basketball, lost his battle with cancer.

So much sadness this week. And so much strength.

“It’s been a rough couple of days for all of us on this campus,” said Painter. “But the thing that’s great about Purdue is the people here. More than anything, it’s the people, the leadership, great faculty. And they’ve done a good job of rallying the campus, but it’s such a tragic thing.”

Painter and his players were somewhat removed from the madness Tuesday; they were just finishing up lunch in their Evanston, Ill., hotel when Twitter exploded with the horrific news. Painter, who doesn’t follow Twitter, got a text from his daughter, Maggie, a freshman at Purdue, saying she was OK and holed up in a classroom in another building.

“It’s just so senseless,” Painter said of the shooting. “It leaves you speechless. How does it ever get to that point?’’

Said senior guard Terone Johnson: “You see things like that on the news; you never think something like that could happen at your school.”

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If only the Boilers could have won this game, the kind of game they need to start winning if they’re to have any shot of being the state’s lone participant in the NCAA tournament. Now, like IU and Indiana State and everybody else in the state, the Boilers are outside the tournament bubble. At 13-7 and 3-4 in the Big Ten, the Boilers need to go on a heroic run the next few months to have any chance of earning NCAA consideration.

Purdue is entering the make-or-break portion of its season, with seven of the remaining 12 Big Ten opponents occupying the Top 25. Painter already has said that a .500 record in the Big Ten won’t be good enough, and he’s right. The Boilers need a massive second wind, one that’s not likely to come for a team that is still very flawed and very young.

Who could have imagined a Painter-coached team missing the tournament two years straight?

The good news is, the starting five has three sophomores, a freshman and just one senior. The bad news is, the starting five has three sophomores, a freshman and a senior. They are young, and they think and they play young. They are a year away, at least.

“I don’t think guys were ready to play,” Terone Johnson said. “For a game like this, you’ve got to come out ready to play. ... We were having some success getting the ball inside. I have no idea why we reverted back to taking bad shots. One stretch we missed four 3s in a row and they scored on 3-of-4 of them. You can’t do that against a team like Wisconsin.”

The Boilers were short-handed almost from the start. Just 1:35 into the game, the perpetually frustrating and befuddling A.J. Hammons picked up his second foul, only to return later and pick up his third almost immediately.

Physically, the enigmatic Hammons has a chance to be a special player at Purdue, a poor man’s Joe Barry Carroll, but something is missing, and it’s been missing since he played high school basketball. Watch him play, watch his body language, watch him away from the ball. It’s clear he doesn’t love the game, and as a result, it doesn’t love him back. He is a 7-foot physical wonder with a nice touch around the basket. Remember last year when he worked over Cody Zeller here in West Lafayette?

But he doesn’t seem to care enough to be great.

He played just 12 foul-plagued minutes Saturday, scored two points, had two rebounds and committed three turnovers. Seven feet of invisibility. It happens too often.

“When you think about stopping Purdue, the first thing you think about is somebody 7-foot, 260,” Painter said. “So if he doesn’t establish himself for us, that really puts us in a bad spot. He’s got to learn to be more accountable. You’ve got to be able to play this game and make good decisions and not turn the ball over. He turns it over entirely too much.”

On a day when a campus could have used some good news, like an upset victory over Wisconsin, Purdue fell grievously short. But at least the fans got a chance to return to something joyful, chanting and cheering and supporting their team in a big-time basketball game.

For a campus that’s been wounded by the kind of senseless violence that visited Purdue on Tuesday, that’s a start.